So I positioned myself, like an anthropologist, on the edge of this scientific community, never seeking to judge the actions or values of its members. Bronislaw Malinowski, the pioneering anthropologist, once observed, “Living in the village with no other business but to follow native life, one sees the customs, ceremonies and transactions over and over again, one has examples of their beliefs as they are actually lived through, and the full body and blood of actual native life fills out soon the skeleton of abstract constructions.” I am not an anthropologist, but that field nevertheless provided me with an ethical relationship to my subjects. I viewed my actors as existing within a particular cultural world, and my interest was in how within this world these objects were produced, explained, and shared; it just so happens that this world is shaped and regulated by the practices and beliefs of science. My desire was not for the ethnographer's close observation of a moment in the life of this scientific community but to view it through the long lens of cultural history in order to understand how and why thinking changed and how ideas were passed from one generation to the next. This approach, when married with anthropological distancing and an a priori belief in the constructive nature of cultural interactions, would, I felt, permit me to understand how the conodont workers came to know their objects and produce their various animals. It would also reveal how they managed to achieve such major intellectual progress while possessing such an incomplete understanding of the objects themselves.1
Using this approach, I chose to treat all knowledge within this community as contingent: different in every mind, often conflicted, and frequently infected with errors and mere orthodoxies. My attitude to these undetected errors and orthodoxies, however, was to treat them as situated truths or beliefs – operationally, this is what they were. At no point was I concerned with what the animal really was, only in what these workers believed it to be. My data, laid out chronologically and thematically in the chapters, reveals the faceted manner in which the object – and thus the animal (the two concepts being held in a confused terminology) – acquired its identity; the animal comes into being not simply as a result of individuals hunting it down, but through glimpses of its tracks and traces. Implicitly, and often as a subplot behind the main action, the animal acquires behavioral, geographical, and historical characteristics before it acquires material form.2
My approach, then, has been to treat the fossils as objects of material culture, “that segment of man's physical environment which is purposely shaped by him according to a culturally dictated plan.”3 Here fossils are anthropological objects before they are mobilized as evidence in science. Paleontology is, though rarely recognized as such, a discipline deeply engaged in material culture study. Most workers saw these fossils as literally and metaphorically beautiful; they certainly had a full appreciation of the objects’ materiality, but the practices of science demanded that they separate the useful data from their poetic experiences. The conodont was (and perhaps still is) one of science's great enigmas because it exists, as Thomas Mann said so eloquently of atoms in the opening quotation, “mean and border-line between material and immaterial.” This is implicitly what this book explores – the dual reality of scientific objects: one material, the other immaterial; one real, the other of the mind.
TAKING KNOWLEDGE TO THE FOSSIL
To begin with, we should consider the knowledge the conodont workers took to the object, for these scientists always came with intentions. Art historian Ernst Gombrich observed, “the role which our own expectations play in the deciphering of the artists’ cryptograms. We come to their works with our receivers already attuned.” Studies of perception in science, art, and society suggest that the conodont workers’ knowledge incorporated what might be understood as factual and accurate truths and all manner of things they imagined or believed to be true or probably true. Gaps in their knowledge were filled – as in the everyday world – using vague memories, possibilities, probabilities, similarities, chance encounters, and so on. We might call this “working knowledge” or, as psychologists in Gombrich's day referred to it, “a mental set,” but in doing so we need to understand that this knowledge is by implication not something hard and fast. So effective is our iterative engagement with the material world that we can possess quite accurate ideas about the properties of things without knowing precisely their cause; imprecise and inaccurate beliefs can be incorporated as substitutes for truth without the world collapsing around us.4
The conodont workers frequently found themselves confronted by objects that forced them to think beyond their previous experiences and thus reach into their stores of expertise, which incorporated things known and (perhaps unknowingly) things thought to be true and relevant. Truth was contingent upon belief. For the true or untrue to have effect or agency in their scientific lives, it had to be believed, or at least be believable. It must for them appear true. The semantics of whether they considered it absolutely, hypothetically, plausibly, or probably true are not important to us. Often these truths were implicit or tacit, and they were almost always undifferentiated.5 Truths of all kinds were performed in much the same way. The conodont workers had a tacit understanding of the possibilities of discovery, the accessibility of reality, the centrality of disinterestedness, the distancing terminology of theories, hypotheses, paradigms, and models (though rarely used it), the superiority of measurement and exact science (particularly chemistry, physics, mathematics and some biology), the necessity of open and testable data, and so on. These things were performed implicitly. They were understood as moral and ethical intentions and expectations. They were the glue that held these workers in the cohesive cultural world they knew as science. But rarely did these beliefs transport them into an abstract intellectual space divorced from other realities and other ways of knowing. Repeatedly they demonstrated that they knew much more about conodonts than other scientists, but nevertheless their expertise was contingent on a whole raft of experiences and aptitudes. They had done science firsthand and so had determined the guiding framework, the rigor applied, the fudging necessary, the things ignored, the treatment of failure, and the impact of external pressures. They knew at least some of the weaknesses and imperfections in their knowledge, but they could not know all of them.
To these banks of hard-won knowledge they also were willing to admit other kinds of “knowledge” communicated by esteemed, innovative, or charismatic colleagues, perhaps in short conference presentations. They, of course, judged the truth of such presentations against their own scientific standards and found support and challenges within them.
A third component in this knowledge making were ideas imported from the past and from other fields, whether through their education, personal research, things read, seen, or heard, or, more broadly, from lived experience. Much of this was made relevant through the selective filter of present need; this imported knowledge was often, as a result, supportive knowledge.
So what each conodont worker knew, and took to the object, was of mixed composition. And never was the knowledge they deployed in this way corralled into a discrete part of the mind away from cars, shops, novels, pets, and babies.6 Repeatedly, workers showed the capacity to bring into their reckoning all manner of external influences, though only some of these were articulated in the papers themselves. Being an object-based interpretive science, which is reliant upon connoisseurship skills, paleontology has come to implicitly value this intellectual eclecticism.7
Each individual, then, possessed a constellation of knowledge about the fossil that had been derived from diverse sources.8 At its core was firsthand knowledge, which defined each individual's territory and scientific identity. It was from the security of this heartland of deep experience that individual conodont workers felt most able to develop and defend new ideas about these fossils, as it permitted them to both evaluate and avoid risks, and maneuver around difficulties. This core experience – often nebulous, undigested, and unarticulated – also held within it latent knowledge that had
the potential to be configured and used as called upon when problems presented themselves. Paleontological combatants, such as Stephen Jay Gould, knew only too well that great advantage could be gained in an argument if one could drag opponents out of this comfort zone and into an alien territory where they would feel at sea. Gould calculated that he possessed greater knowledge in these other fields, which often drew upon episodes in science, science history, and the classical arts, in which opponents would be too embarrassed to show their ignorance. One way of overcoming these difficulties, however – particularly for experienced conodont workers forced to migrate into new intellectual territories as their research developed – was to seek collaborations with other specialists and/or undergo a degree of self-education.
The variable, eclectic, and contingent manner in which knowledge was acquired and then applied within the conodont research community made individualism a core resource. Among the conodont workers it appears that only Lennart Jeppsson came under the spell of Björn Kurtén, the cave geologist, and only Maurits Lindström held conversations with algal biologist Adolf von Stosch. As a result they could bring unique perspectives into a debate. A quick survey of the thoughts of senior conodont workers on the nature of the animal, conducted in 2007, for example, revealed a surprising array of thinking, despite recent breakthrough discoveries. The imagined animal present in these minds possessed no singularity of form, even if it seemed to coalesce around a number of discrete possibilities. Each worker based part of his or her understanding on the same animal specimens, though most of them had no firsthand experience of the fossils themselves. Each individual viewed this evidence through the filter of his or her own experiences. Far from being problematic, these varied beliefs and performances gave conodont research an intellectual richness, suppleness, and adaptability. The lack of a singularity of view – of a narrowly conceived paradigm for the animal – meant that the animal's elusive identity remained unimportant. It could be worked around or held constantly in negotiation. And anyway, resolving its identity was never the conodont workers’ central occupation.
The other implication of this eclecticism was the frequent appearance of what conodont workers referred to as “luck.” Few stopped to consider that a socially connected, opportunistic, and intellectually focused and eclectic culture might have little need for mere chance.9 This feeling, however, demonstrates that members of this community felt that surprising progress was being made; in other words, this socially negotiated, culturally conforming, yet freely intellectualizing community was effective.
These aspects of science culture, frequently discussed by historians and philosophers of science, empowered individuals to mobilize objects as evidence. The history of the conodont animal, however, reveals a huge number of such mobilizations: Countless kinds of animal and plant were put forward as the owners of Pander's mysterious tiny teeth. In a rigorous scientific field, populated with talented individuals, how could this happen? Surely the fossils themselves – the material evidence of the thing – would prevent this?
THE INTANGIBILITY OF FOSSILS
In 1988, Walt Sweet observed that workers possessed a large number of isolated tooth-like conodont fossils representing some four thousand species, together with five hundred assemblages and five conodont animals.10 He stated that these alone were the facts; “all the rest is really speculation or, if you will, interpretation.” Sweet believed that anything other than these few material facts was contestable, and although he referred to “species” – which he knew resulted from acts of interpretation – this was simply his concise way of saying “four thousand precisely known types of material object.” Lennart Jeppsson gave a nice illustration of this disconnection between material reality (specimens) and immaterial belief (species): “One specimen = one species; two specimens = two species; 100 specimens = one species.” His point here is that once a conodont worker had sufficient material, he or she became a connoisseur of species’ variation and was then able to distinguish differences in an informed manner.
American paleontologist David Raup once admitted that “the road to good scholarship is paved with imagined patterns.” One of those imagined patterns, I suggest, is the fossil as it appears in science. Fossils preserve traces of former life and are composed of minerals that in most cases are not those that existed in the living animal or plant. Yet in common usage we simplify this understanding; we think of the fossil as a trace of life, disregarding the complex processes (geological and intellectual) by which it has come to be considered as such. There is, for example, an unarticulated and ambiguous boundary between the fossilized animal or plant and the materials of which it is composed or a part.11 This ambiguity is apparent in the work of Karl von Zittel and Josef Victor Rohon in the late nineteenth century. They reinterpreted structures long thought to record the anatomy of the animal as mere artifacts of fossilization. Things once considered reminiscent of life were made irrelevant; they were now just rock or mineral. This interpretive act should indicate to us that the fossils that existed within the minds of the conodont workers were different from those preserved in stone. Indeed, the fossil that participates in science is only ever a conceptual or immaterial one: a fossil imagined and believed and not the one that has been hewn, boiled, or dissolved out of the rock. To make use of the material fossil, science must interpret it and in doing so decide what characteristics define it, its material and taxonomic boundaries, its significances, and so on. It is this value-laden fossil – a conceptual fossil, a representation of the reality – that then enters the mind and the science and is partially captured in word and image. This notion has its origins more than two millennia ago, and it is not my intention to attempt to engage with general philosophy. I merely wish to explain the broad basis on which I have explored the practices of this particular group of scientists. A few sound bites might at least set the scene. Ian Parker, for example, noted, “We must separate the world from our knowledge of it. We live in an Umwelt, beyond which there are currently unimagined material possibilities. We must assume that the world is richer than we know.” Goethe remarked in 1823, “My thinking is not separate from objects; that the elements of the object, the perceptions of the object, flow into my thinking and are fully permeated by it.” Edmond Husserl wrote that “the objects that surround us function less ‘as they are’ than ‘as they mean,’ and objects only mean for someone…. To see implies seeing meaningfully.” Bertrand Russell observed, “It is not correct to say that I am believing the actual event; what I am believing is something now in my mind…since the event is not occurring but the believing is…. What is believed…is not the actual fact that makes the belief true, but a present event related to the fact. This present event, which is what is believed, I shall call the ‘content’ of belief.” Finally, Alfred Schütz: “Even the thing perceived in everyday life is more than a simple sense presentation. It is a thought object, a construct of a highly complicated nature.”12
The material object from which our conceptual fossil is produced remains simply that: material and mute but bearing witness to its origins and the context from which it has come. Science can take its immaterial (or conceptual) fossils wherever it likes, and in the case of the conodont fossils this has been to imagine them in a wide variety of ways. The silent, material fossil – the real fossil – remains in a drawer or on a microscope slide. Although situated in the tame environment of a collection, this object sits apart from science, always belonging to a reality beyond science. Being real, it is there to question science and to be the subject of new investigations as new knowledge and technologies permit; it alone – it must be believed – has the potential to reveal the ultimate truth.13 Science's great task is to unlock that truth or, rather, make its truth the same.
To suggest this reading, rather than adopt the realism the scientists themselves deploy, is not to weaken our conception of the science. It simply means that science's inaccuracies and mistaken beliefs remain separated from reality by an invisible and impenet
rable barrier; the factuality of material objects is never dependent upon the vagaries of scientific belief.14 History shows that real fossils have never been affected by thought; they have proven immune to designer gods and successive creations, untouched by the Flood and all those variants of evolution that were believed before and after Darwin. The evidential or immaterial or conceptual object appeals to the truth of the material fossil, but its connection to its material twin is detached and fluid – it lives in another world. The object in our thoughts seems material, definite, and fixed, but it is in fact intangible, contingent, and transient.15
The Great Fossil Enigma Page 41
